The Mortal Kombat lore has always been a bit of a mess. Well, that's being too generous. It's been a disaster. At first, it started pretty simple, Scorpion wanted revenge on Sub-Zero, everyone wanted to win the tournament and Raiden wanted to have a party for the gods that destroy the Earth (realm). Okay that last one was retconned for good reason, but you get the idea. One big running theme, though, are the elder gods that enforce the rules unless you're evil. If you're evil, you get a free ride to do whatever you want until it's conveniant for the plot to say otherwise.
(Spoiler Alert for MK9 through MK1)
The story has been hard reset. The Playstation 2 3D games ended with Armageddon and were given a new beginning through Mortal Kombat 9. Now, it's not like they did a great job with the hard reset, because they ended up killing off 80% of the characters throughout the story... again. There was a horrific cut scene of Sindel just walking through, bonking everyone on the head and killing them easily before being killed by Night Wolf sacrificing himself. The death toll was taken to another level through MKX.
Many characters had an undead evil counterpart called revanents. Through these forms, they can use magical mumbo jumbo to bring them back to life and the entire concept just makes things more grimey to get through. Now we have a way to die and come back to life. This is not a good corner to crawl out of, story-wise and they do not use it well in the slightest. The failure to MKX's story is nothing compared to the can of worms they release in the next title, though.
We've gone through resurrections, now we're going through multiverses! Call it time travel all you like, but multiverses come in droves and bring about new versions of characters. MK11 decides it wants to get rid of the new slightly more evil Raiden that came about thanks to Shinnok's amulet corrupting him. We spend the entire game of MK9 and MKX following this Raiden, only for him to be literally erased and replaced with the one from MK9.
So now the entire story is made into a stew. Old characters are meeting new characters and apparently Kotal Kahn hooked up with Jade, so there's a weird shipping decision. Either way, this story has pushed the crazy button already and that's not even considering how D'Vorah killed the new version of Scorpion and had him replaced with Scorpion from MK9.
Are you realizing a pattern here? It seems that these people at Nether Realm Studios just can't seem to handle death, as ironic as that sounds for this series. Every single time they kill a main character, it seems that they are forced to give into some sort of backlash or realization that the character they just offed is too marketable to truly let go. Now, they need to come up with some way to kill them in some form while having a replacement for them ready on hand.
The lack of stakes is one of the reasons why this new storyline is wasted in potential. Once they introduce Kronika into the story, she becomes their biggest excuse to bring characters back and/or kill them off without any risk to their sales. Because of this, they start changing literally everything. Not only does it invade this story, but it also screws up the ending by giving Shang Tsung the crown and the ability to change reality to his own liking. Let's go with: I do not consider the DLC even remotely canon. It changes the entire story for the worse and wastes everyone's time because Liu Kang still gets his god powers and restarts reality anyway.
Yes, Liu Kang was caught up in all of this too. It's still a great thing to put into the series, given that Liu Kang and Raiden do continuously fight throughout MK history. Putting in a timeline where they join powers together in order to defeat the villain is a very good way to do this. The timeline is so screwed up before everything in Shang's DLC story that he was going to do the restart anyway.
This article won't even go into how the multiverse plot affected MK1 (2023), but it's pretty obvious they kept pushing the multiverse once again just for the excuse to bring more and more legacy characters and mix them with the other action figures in the toy box. While this multiverse stuff does come out with some interesting interactions between characters, it's an overall hollow experience. When anything and everything can happen in a story, it stops being all that interesting. There needs to be something to reign it n before it trips all over itself.
Mortal Kombat needs to drop this stupid idea that killing characters and bringing out more and more powerful people can sustain the story in any meaningful way. Much like the Dragon Ball franchise, this just ends up building a garbage story with enormous plotholes you could drive a truck through. No amount of nostalgia or fan pandering can cover up writers who don't know what to do. Trying to offer new DLC content behind a paywall or making your characters only available through real money, is just proving people right when they say your story is just a vehicle for extra pay content. Also, get some real writers and have an actual plan!
There's always a good bit of entertainment to be had in Mortal Kombat's Lore. Sometimes they don't take full advantage of their position. Sometimes they make characters who do next to nothing and only exist to look cool. It's a fun ride through the story from a gameplay perspective, but when you step back and think for two seconds, immediately finding plot holes and uncharacterized moments, there is something wrong. When your cut scene literally makes people rage quit your game, then it's time to think of another strategy. Now, go get some water before your next fight and don't slip on the blood.
